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FCC Declares Intention To Enforce Net Neutrality
Unequivocal writes "The FCC chairman, Julius Genachowski, told Congress today that the 'Federal Communications Commission plans to keep the Internet free of increased user fees based on heavy Web traffic and slow downloads. ...Genachowski... told The Hill that his agency will support "net neutrality" and go after anyone who violates its tenets. "One thing I would say so that there is no confusion out there is that this FCC will support net neutrality and will enforce any violation of net neutrality principles," Genachowski said when asked what he could do in his position to keep the Internet fair, free and open to all Americans. The statement by Genachowski comes as the commission remains locked in litigation with Comcast. The cable provider is appealing a court decision by challenging the FCC's authority to penalize the company for limiting Web traffic to its consumers.' It looks like the good guys are winning, unless the appeals court rules against the FCC."
Canada doesn't give two shits about what the FCC has to say about net neutrality.
The CRTC has been actively working against the entire idea of net neutrality, and the very few providers that don't have to answer to the CRTC perform lovely things like AD insertion/replacement and falsifying DNS, not to mention throttling competitor's VoIP service (but, of course, not their own).
Canada has the sort of internet you find in the 3rd world. The only difference being not the price, nor the bandwidth (the price and average available bandwidth is in-line with most 3rd internet world pricing) but rather the caps on the service (most 3rd world countries have somewhat smaller caps).
Way to go, Canada!
The FCC's Network Neutrality Principles are:
Neither of the principles you state are, as such, strictly necessary to meet those principles.
That being said, discrimination by source or destination could in some cases violated the principles (e.g., if an ISP that is also a content provider outright blocks access to traffic trying to reach competing content providers over its network, or blocks all port 80 requests, or all requessts that appear to use the HTTP protocol, going to their non-business subscribers IPs.) Likewise, discrimination by protocol might in some cases violate the protocol (indeed, the last example of discrimination by source or destination is also a discrimination by protocol.) Whether deprioritizing rather than outright blocking traffic using certain ports or protocols would violate the principles depends on the circumstances; presumably, deprioritization that made it impractical to use the protocol for its principal purpose would be problematic.
The problem is, ISP's are already doing it based on protocol, and it's bad. If your internet service is provided by a cable company, they just may slow down video protocols as perceived competition on their own bandwidth, but allow voice ones through to take a stab at phone companies.
On the other hand, if you have a DSL through a phone provider, they just may slow down voice/audio protocols for the same reasons, but allow video ones through to take a stab at cable companies.
There was a LOT of competitions, back biting, and attempts at legislation between both of these types of companies a few years back, I remember TONS of commercials with each side trying to get the people on board. Both sides pretty much supported the concept of government intervention to keep the other out of their business while allowing their side to get into the others. I'm generally against most government intervention.
In most cases, a competitor will spring up when one type of industry is screwing the people at large that doesn't screw the people at large, at least at first. Unfortunately in communications industries those competitors are few and far between.
I would LOVE to start my own cable company that simply pushed analog and QAM TV without the need for converter boxes and was utterly lacking in all but absolutely require encryption. I think the public would love to use their own TV tuners again and be able to build their MythTV boxes/use their Tivos without having to clear it with some mystical gate keeper.
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
Titles 3 & 4 of the 1996 Telecommunications Act.
Specificially the preemption of franchising authority regulation of telecommunication services, and the elimination of most of the greedy/protective (depending on your political views) PSC boards.
The alternative is something they don't want, which is why they are trying to find some illiterate judge to declare the FCC impotent.
a handful of selfish greedy people are no match for millions of selfish, greedy people -u4ya
Presumably because Congress, by law, has given the FCC authority to regulate interstate and foreign communication to acheive policy aims set by Congress, including, for instance, direction "to preserve the vibrant and competitive free market that presently exists for the Internet" and "to promote the continued development of the Internet" and to "encourage the deployment on a reasonable and timely basis of advanced telecommunications capability to all Americans", and also because of the US Supreme Court ruling in Brand X, 545 U.S. 967 (2005) that "the Commission remains free to impose special regulatory duties on facilities-based ISPs under its Title I ancillary jurisdiction."
(Additional authority is cited in the FCC's Memorandum Opinion and Order in the Comcast case.)
No, there are net neutrality principles that the FCC has articulated that it believes are appropriate and necessary to acheive the mandates the FCC has been given by Congress with regard to the internet, and which it intends to use to guide its policymaking in that area.
True, principles, as such, have no binding force. The FCC Net Neutrality principles, one should note, are essentially a statement of how the Commission intends to acheive the objectives set for it in law, using its existing statutory authority; they aren't asserted to be independent legal authority.
Anyone can take the FCC to court for anything they want; whether they can win or not is another matter.
I'm sure it's not in your opinion, but you're sadly oversimplifying or ignoring every use case and ignoring the drivers behind QoS in general. If you want something simplistic and turnkey, there's certainly products out there. Netequalizer springs to mind.
But hey, let's throw in a few simple examples:
HTTP downloads vs. Flash video streamed over HTTP. One is decidedly interactive (even if buffering certainly helps), the other one is decidedly non-interactive (even if faster = neater, naturally).
SIP telephony vs. SIP videoconferencing. Agnosticism per your definition would make the algorithm punish the SIP videocon.
Or, let's take an even simpler example: P2P. Rather than a few very hungry connections, you get a large number of connections pushing less data per connection.
One can always argue that service providers should provide enougb bandwidth so that they won't even have to prioritize data the first place. Nice in theory, hard (or simply uneconomic) in practice. Take a cable provider - with a limited upstream bandwidth per channel, you need some sort of fairness. Simple per-plug fairness works to some extent, but you don't really want to punish the puny amount of upstream data your average HTTP request would generate just because the same user is P2P'ing like there's no tomorrow. Makes for a bad user experience.
When we get to wireless, it gets even messier with the limited and shared upstream and downstream.
I could go on for a whie, but I believe the point has been made. It's not a case of "You simply XYZ" at all.
Why was this modded insightful. It should be "-1 ignorant". There is virtually nothing factual or truthful about the parent post about the ICC, it is a rant from either an libertarian extremist or a far-right extremist. Personally, and without looking at the user's other posts, I vote for far-right with a patina of libertarianism. I say this because the poster appears to claim that the Republicans weren't really conservative. Apparently it seems he may have his own custom definition of conservative not shared by the rest of society.
The article for the ICC at Wikipedia is here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_Commerce_Commission
According to the parent, the ICC was formed after a dispute over four trucks, especially considering that the article states the ICC was formed in 1887 to regulate railroads. I'm fairly sure that interstate cargo transport would not have been done by ICE trucks. If they existed the existing roads would have not been passable, the relative unreliability of early ICE engines and vehicles is another factor to consider. Even better, in the 1970' and 1980's Congress started taking away powers from the ICC (many were probably just redistributed instead) and in 1995 the ICC was abolished by the Republicans in Congress. The remaining functions of the ICC were distributed to the Surface Transportation Board. Interestingly, the ICC was the model for many other federal agencies like the FCC, SEC, and FTC among others. Its hard to argue against the need for a functional SEC and FTC today at least in a credible manner.
While personally I would like more people, who are well informed to be involved in a constructive manner with the government. I prefer inactive, but informed individuals rather than people like the parent, who is badly misinformed or who even knows what they are spewing is untrue. While I'm not saying the parent does this, but acting like hooligans nonviolent or otherwise in order to obstruct the government helps no one, not even themselves.
Impersonating Tycho from Penny Arcade since before there was a PA.